Gotta wonder what good old Rod Serling would think if we resurrected him inside a modern data center. Surrounded by humming racks of Sun servers, he just might start narrating. I can hear him now, intoning ominously as the LEDs blinked all around, “I’m traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of my imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead …”

Rod was great. He (of all people) came to mind when I was reading about Sun Solaris 10 virtualization. The people at Sun kinda asked for it when they decided a virtual environment created under Solaris 10 is a “Solaris Zone.” That’s a name right out of 50s-era, drive-in movie science fiction. Rod would love it!

FWIW, a “Solaris Zone,” as defined by the dudes at Sun, is “A virtual environment that has security and application fault containment, and its own name space that can be tailored to the application that will run in it.”

I had an uncle who used to confuse me when I was young because he regularly said something or other, like his Buick, was “solid as Sears.”

Why would he come to mind as I looked into all the wonderful aspects of Sun Microsystems’ virtualization efforts? After all, Uncle Jack — may he R.I.P. — wouldn’t know a Solaris Container from a StorageTek tape drive.

For some reason, the memory of favorite uncle’s Sears references were stimulated when I read that Sears Canada used Sun virtualization to save $200,000 each year and reduce batch processing time by up to 85 percent.

The value of virtualization doesn’t get much more solid than that, Jack.

There sure is a lot of propeller-headed, pocket-protected computer geek language to be digested when you start researching consolidation and virtualization. Ironically, much of it all seems so, um, virtual.

But one case highlighted by Sun Microsystems is pretty convincing that, despite all the seemingly ephemeral talk about containers and partitioning and logical domains, there’s some Real World dollars and cents benefits to it all.

KnowledgeBase Marketing’s decision to use Sun virtualization resulted in cutting the company’s total cost of ownership by 40 percent. It reduced administration time by about 50 percent and it brought an 86 percent cut in transaction costs.

Man, they can throw out the percentages! Here are more: A 70 percent reduction in channel utilization; a 25 percent drop in tape costs; a 200 percent increase in tape capacity and (drum roll please) a 300 percent improvement in 1/0 throughput.

Let’s play with this a bit, shall we. Pretend we’re hired by Sun Microsystems to come up with a catchy slogan for the Sun Modular Datacenter (which is, no lie, a data center that comes installed in a standard shipping container).

The “MD” is an amazing idea that Sun describes as “the ultimate consolidation and virtualization platform.” A datacenter that comes on a flatbed truck, gets hoisted by a crane onto a foundation, gets wired and supplied with water and is just about ready for action.

It takes up an eighth of the space and reduces cooling costs by a cool 40 percent. And companies can deploy these things in a tenth of the time it takes to build a regular sprawled-out data center.

So. What would you do if you were the “creative” assigned to the ad campaign? Maybe something along the lines of “To think outside the box, we went inside the box.”

It’s not often that a press release brings a smile. They serve a purpose, but it ain’t entertainment.

Still, a flicker of a smile came to my face when I read a recent Sun Microsystems press release. It said a certain product is available “without the hassle of payment.” Indeed, paying for stuff is such a hassle, isn’t it?

In simpler terms, the product – VirtualBox – is free. It’s open source, and can be freely downloaded.

VirtualBox, created by innotek, a company recently acquired by Sun, brings virtualization to the desktop. In other words, “without the hassle of payment,” you can simultaneously run different operating systems including Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, even DOS, and easily switch between them.

For all the great computing advances of the 1990s, it turns out we were racing toward a brick wall in terms of data center design.

As Sun Microsystems explains on its Web site, the goal of most ’90s IT architects was –– to “decompose applications into separate components.” That sounds like what happens in a compost pile, but we’ll leave that one alone …

Actually, they’re talking about the way most applications were replicated for availability, hosted on separate, dedicated servers and supplied with more processing power than necessary.

So we made a bunch of inefficient, power-hungry, land-hogging data centers that now cost a fortune to operate.

That’s why Sun’s virtualization and consolidation efforts are important. Through virtualization technology, companies can make multiple applications share servers. There are many other benefits to consolidation and virtualization, so – tough as it might be – it really is time to kiss the ’90s goodbye.

Motorcycle enthusiasts get accustomed to model names with lots of letters. While many people – even those with limited motorcycledom awareness –have heard of an Electra-Glide, only a few know an FHLTCU when they see one.Of course, IT companies are no different. But at least Sun Microsystems had a purpose when it decided that the “umbrella term” for its virtualization and management programs will be xVM.Those letters aren’t just there to look cool. The “x” stands for “cross,” the “V” refers to “virtualization” and the “M” means “management.”It’s pretty revolutionary, actually. Sun is not only helping enterprises gain efficiency through virtualization; it’s also helping them manage that often complex effort. CIOs might want to think about that as they ride to work on their CBR1100XXs.For more information, please visit http://www.electronicdatagirl.com